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Sport 24: Summer 2000

This was his ordinary car. When you first look at it, it just looks like a hunk of rubbish2

This was his ordinary car. When you first look at it, it just looks like a hunk of rubbish2

Jeff's car was never empty. Perhaps, when he tried to sell it at Webb's auction in March 1993 or when he shipped it across to Australia in May of the same year, it might have been less full, but I never saw it empty. I never saw it empty and I never saw it without a tow ball—that's where Te Papa have got it most wrong.

The inside of the car was always dusty and throughout summer would smell of spilt milk and the cardboard pine-tree-shaped car deodorant which had been bought to cover the smell of the milk and had subsequently got lost amongst all the other things which filled the car.

It was impossible to get into the car without looking at your feet and first figuring out how you would arrange yourself around the cans of paint which were always on the floor on the passenger side. One of the last times I saw the car close up, I noticed that someone had knocked over a can of paint, and that the floor of the car was layered with yellow-soaked newspapers. On the concrete outside the car were yellow shoe prints which gradually faded as they walked from the car, across the car park, and up the stairs towards the entrance of the Dowse Art Museum.

The objects in Jeff's car could, I suppose, be divided into two categories: tools and other objects. Three categories if you included all his clothes—a clean set and a stick of deodorant would be stuffed into a bag somewhere in the car—and food. It seemed that he only ever ate food that came served in a thin white paper bag.

Besides the rolls of fencing wire, the things that were most page 5 noticeable to anyone travelling in the car were the small plastic animals and rivets. The animals served as models for many of his works. In the glove box, for example, was a small black plastic gorilla which served as the model for the corrugated iron King Kong which looms over an ice-cream shop on Napier's Marine Parade. The rivets covered most of the surfaces of the car—they were always on the seats; their spent tails, short sticks of metal, poked into your legs every time you shifted position. We had rivets in our knife-and-fork drawer in our flat on Talavera Terrace in Kelburn.

Jeff had an exhibition at the Bowen Gallery and arrived late one night from Napier with his trailer loaded with curved sheets of corrugated iron. The iron was stacked high, tied with lengths of yellow rope, ripped shreds of foam rubber placed under the rope at intervals so as to protect it from the sharp edges of the iron. He parked his car where I always parked my car: outside the neighbours' house, in the residents' car park. In the morning, tucked beneath the windscreen wiper, was a lavender-coloured envelope containing a folded sheet of thick lavender writing paper which read: Do not park this car (crossed out) thing here again.